Elizabeth Wilson

The Rhetoric of Urban Space

Is there still a living choice between Necropolis and Utopia: the possibility of building a new kind of city that will, freed of inner contradictions, positively enrich and further human development? (Lewis Mumford)

Cities are always too complex to be captured in axioms . . . The close relationship between space and society, between cities and history . . . [results not in] the coherent spatial form of an overwhelming social logic . . . but [in] the tortured and disorderly, yet beautiful patchwork of human creation and suffering. (Manuel Castells)